


i will be your ground

by Misprinting (misprinting)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron Spoilers, Gen, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Suicidal Thoughts, bucky barnes' hair, self-care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 14:24:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1513751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misprinting/pseuds/Misprinting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A character study. The subject: Bucky’s hair. (Also, a Bucky comes in from the cold fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will be your ground

**Author's Note:**

> (not crack. god i wish this were crack.)
> 
> i started writing this as not-fic to myself, in an attempt to figure out a steve!voice and who the fuck bucky is to me. it evolved, but in the way of evolution-y things it did so slowly and is still a lot like not-fic. i'm posting it anyway because it has a beginning a middle and even an end, and because it gave me the warm and fuzzies while i was writing it. and everyone needs to write a bucky comes in from the cold fic, right?
> 
> title from banks' work.
> 
> ps. the suicidal thoughts i warned for above is actually a comment made by one character to another who then becomes a big part of that first character's support system. skip the bit in the past tense if you need to avoid it. idk why i didn't name names, it's probably fairly obvious who i'm talking about. but.

Bucky’s been back to himself for three months and he’s still keeping his hair long, ragged. He shaves now every other day with a throw-away razor Steve gave him a week in, when it’d still just been Steve who believed he was the right Bucky again, so he stays clean shaven. Thinking about it, Steve really needs to take him out to get a new razor. Things have been busy since Bucky came in from the cold.

He’d come in willingly, on his own. Steve and Sam had chased him for nearly a year almost twice around the globe, and they’d ended up back in DC for an info swap with Natasha right when Steve had been called in to London. And London… London had been… well, not easy.

Steve had been glad to get back to DC, nursing a shoulder that still felt like it’d set wrong (x-rays and the finest medical staff on offer had assured him it wasn’t, but god it ached, and he wasn’t used to putting up with pain so long these days) and ready to fall into his own bed for two days at least. Instead, he’d come home to Sam’s spare room to find that Bucky had left him a calling card; one of his knives stabbed through the wall next to Steve’s mirror, a note pinned to it. ‘Stop following me,’ the note had said, but on the back had been two scribbled out messages, one fairly legible and the second much less so: ‘I’m not the guy you remember’ and ‘help me’. That second had been so illegible Steve had thought at first he was just reading from it what he wanted to see, but Sam, squinting at it over his shoulder, had said, “What does that say? Help me? Fuck-“ and that was all Steve had needed to believe it.

He’d been prepared to chase Bucky all over the world again, so he’d taken time to pack before going looking for the trail. He needn’t have; he’d found Bucky sleeping in a park two streets down from Sam’s house, wrapped in a soaked through trench coat, and when Steve knelt in front of him and touched his shoulder to wake him, he’d woken quietly, vigilant in a second. He’d looked right at Steve and said, “I told you to fuck off, Rogers,” and there’d been fury and desperation in his eyes but the Brooklyn roll on ‘Rogers’ had been pure Bucky. Steve had smiled tightly and answered, “You say a lot of crap, Barnes. When did I ever listen?”

Laughing hadn’t exactly been in Bucky’s programming back then, but his reaction hadn’t been to try to kill Steve, so it’d been one step closer, at least. It’d also been heartbreaking. He’d looked away from Steve, shifted back from him, defensive, like he’d been expecting blows to start raining down on him any second, and said, “Fuck off. Fuck off, please, just go away. I’m not him.” He’d shifted his eyes to Steve, then, glaring at him, something dangerous as a wild animal behind his eyes. “Leave me alone. I want to die.”

Steve’s heart had stopped, his breath shuddered, and he’d fought with himself not to reach out and grab onto Bucky. Take him home for food and warmth and care by force. He’d stopped himself, but it had been so hard to.

“Not going anywhere, Buck,” Steve had answered, not touching Bucky even though he itched to, could literally feel the itch in the tips of his fingers to just get to touch his best friend again, to maybe feel like he was real, finally. Instead he’d moved to sit next to Bucky, sharing the tree trunk he’d been leant against and staying there, feeling Bucky be solid and real and by his side again, just for a moment. Steve had said, “I need you, Buck. Please, come on. I need you with me.”

Bucky had stayed still — more still, if possible, tense all over — for a long time, and Steve hadn’t moved, until finally he’d twisted just slightly to look at Steve from the corner of his eye. “I’ve killed so many people,” he’d said.

“I know. I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

Bucky’s mouth had twisted; confused, angry. Always angry. Lost, too. “Not people who deserved to die. Not Nazis. Just- just dad’s, and uncles, and brothers. Kids. Moms. Sisters. Tried to kill you. I’d’ve killed _your_ mom if they’d told me too.”

“Just orders, Buck,” Steve had said. He’d half-shrugged, bringing his knees up to his chest and feeling suddenly like he’s been transported back to their childhood, hidden together somewhere dark and sharing secrets. It’d been damp and cold enough to be from their childhood. He’d felt his own lips twist and tried to control himself, to show Bucky the conviction and belief he’s had stripped from him. He’d said, “You know I don’t take that ‘just following orders’ crap, you know what I think of that excuse. But God, Bucky, it’s not an excuse when you had nothing but orders, and no way to protect yourself but to follow them. I know I don’t… exactly understand what happened to you yet, but Sam and me, we managed to piece a fair bit of it together. You didn’t choose to follow your orders, Buck. It’s not even like it was your only option. It was just what you were made to do. No agency; no blame. Sam told me that. I’m not ever gonna blame you for what you were made to do, Buck. Not because you’re my best friend, either, but because I’d be fundamentally wrong to. The blood you spilt is not on your hands. Please believe me when I say I don’t just think that, I know it, and it’s just true.”

“I’ve never believed in things like you do.”

“That’s okay. It’s okay, Buck. You can leave the believing up to me, for now. Will you come home with me?”

Three months later and he’s like a different person, in most every way. He remembers everything, but slowly. He stops in the most mundane of moments and stares blankly at whatever’s in front of him a couple of times a day, remembering more of himself. It’s mostly Bucky that comes back to him, only sometimes things he’d done as the Winter Soldier, and those are the ones that leave him shaking, sometimes screaming, like he’s in a waking nightmare. But he’s trying so hard to be Bucky, trying to slip into patterns he and Steve know from a long time ago. Just: jokes, settling into each other’s orbit, and having each other’s backs.

He calls Steve “punk” over pizza one night. Fancy pizza in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan with Natasha, Pepper and Bruce, who seem to think Steve and Bucky need to see enjoyable things in this century to feel attached to it. Steve hasn’t told them “this century gave me my best friend back” yet because he doesn’t want to jinx it, and he suspects they wouldn’t take it as a sign he’s really committed to the now, anyway, but he feels like maybe he could when he steals a slice of Bucky’s pizza (he fully intends on giving him back a slice of his own in a second) and Bucky flashes a laugh up at him and says, “Punk. Give that here or I’ll wrestle it back off you.” Steve knows he must light up, can feel himself sit straighter and thinks he could float, but just slaps at Bucky’s hand when he tries to take the slice back and says, “Jerk” with a wicked grin. Bucky’s smile turns smaller, a little, but it’s not like sadness, the way his face falling would be, it’s just- it’s more than a grin, or a laugh. It’s tentative, hard-won happiness, or something close, and Steve returns that same smile.

He squares up beside Steve the first time he meets Tony and Tony says something neither Steve or Bucky understand but they know is an insult (one Steve translates as friendly, but Bucky doesn’t know Stark like that yet) and taps Steve twice on the chest saying, “alright, gramps, try to keep up, we’ve got places to be.” Bucky shifts just slightly in front of Steve and starts to say, “Hey, asshole-“ and then something stupid, probably, and Steve is so fond he almost forgets to stop him. Pepper steps in, and thank God for her, and reminds Bucky of what they’d both warned him on their way to meet Tony, that he was a dick and a genius but that he almost always meant well. That he and Steve were friends. Bucky doesn’t really stand down, but he calms, keeping Steve at his back where he can protect him, and Steve feels fifteen again, tiny and frail and stood behind his best friend and brother who’ll always go to bat for him. Steve feels blessed.

Bucky’s trying so hard to fall back into being himself, as he was seventy years ago, that it takes Steve a while to think seriously about the way his hair is still long, that and his arm the only things outside of his own head that Bucky’s left himself as reminders of the time in between, when he wasn’t the old Bucky or the new Bucky. Steve remembers asking Bucky to fight Hydra with him back during the war, in that bar, and remembers Bucky’s hair being longer than it should have been then, too. But his uniform had been messy, he’d had a mean five o-clock shadow he could have been reprimanded for, and for all that he’d looked like he’d come out of hell, he hadn’t looked half as bad as he’d had the right to. Now, he looks good. Sam had taken him shopping, sorted him out with jeans and tshirts and a dozen jumpers, jackets, hoodies; things that keep him warm and keep his arm covered. Nothing like what he used to wear before the war, but stuff that seems right after a half-day of him wearing them.

The hair doesn’t look like him. He’s not letting it grow longer than it is so he must be cutting it, at least, but Steve can’t quite figure out if it’s healthy for him to be keeping ahold of something that speaks of mistreatment from a time when he was more weapon than man. He’s tempted to ask Sam what he thinks, but he gets sidetracked, thinking, _God, to think it’s been three months and I’m already getting time to worry about his_ hair _. Life can’t be too bad._ He shakes it off, goes for a run, and when he gets back and Bucky smiles at him in a silent _welcome home_ he forgets to worry so much.

Then there’s a thing, a, well, a thing where Steve nearly dies, and Bucky doesn’t cope well with it. (Only that’s not true, entirely; Bucky copes so well it aches for Steve to watch. It might be that it’s Steve who doesn’t cope so well.) Steve and the team have been trying to track down Wanda and Pietro since the thing in London, but they don’t often get leads. They’re not even sure they’re together anymore, just that when they get a glimpse of either of them they’re always too late to talk by the time they reach them. They get another of their glimpses in Montreal and Steve, Clint, and Thor head up there to take a look, honestly not expecting to find any trace of her.

They find her in the tunnels underneath the city and she panics. Clint is on the ground for once, taking point for lack of another option and because he has the best chance at being someone she trusts, trying to talk to her and tell her that they just want to help her, that she needs people around her who can help her to control her powers. But she doesn’t listen, or can’t, and she pulls the tunnel walls down around them. Steve gets to Clint and covers him, taking the weight of it on his back. It takes two hours for Thor, who had been covering their retreat, to get them out. 

Bucky comes up to Montreal and waking up to find him at his bedside is like a resurrection Steve’s entire pre-war life. He’s got the same pale, drawn and furious expression on his face, like back then; he’s always been angry at the stuff that hurts Steve, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Tony or Hydra or a back-alley thug or a common cold. He stays with Steve while he recovers, the whole time, and once he’s well enough to get up Bucky hits him gently on the shoulder, and that’s all the “I’m glad you’re okay” Steve has ever needed.

They move their stay to Stark tower, where Hill and Tony pick Steve’s brain for information on where Wanda might have gone, if Pietro had been there, how she’d done what she’d done, and Bucky disappears downstairs somewhere with Natasha. Steve follows him hours later and finds them sparring in the gym, though there’s so much violence to it and it’s so fast, so deadly, that Steve almost runs in to stop it before they kill each other. He’s just got the door open when Bucky stops, though, and must signal somehow because Natasha stops, too. She drops her arms and he shoves his hair back with a grunt of frustration, both hands curling in it like he’s going to pull for a second before dropping. Natasha watches him, picking up a water bottle and taking a drink, before stepping closer to Bucky and holding out a hair tie.

“Here,” she says, and, when Bucky looks at it like a foreign object, puts a hand on his shoulder before stepping behind him, the touch careful, there to ensure he knows where she is, as she pulls his hair back and ties it up for him. It’s messy and quick, but he stands straighter when it’s done. After another moment they return to fighting, and he thanks her when they stop, either for the hair tie or for the training (Steve recognises it for that now, wonders if it means Bucky would be willing to have his back out there again, thinks how much he’d like that, and squashes it down for now with a reminder it’s been just over three months and he cannot push).

Natasha passes Steve on her way out with a friendly pat to his shoulder and a soft, “good to see you alive; you had me concerned,” and then Bucky turns to Steve. His face is carefully blank, his walls up, shoulders high and tense. He waits for Steve to say something, but he’s all stubbornness in his jaw, and for a second, with his hair out of the way like that and that look in his eyes, he’s more like the Bucky Steve grew up with than he’s been since ’42.

“Shaking off the rust?” is all Steve asks, offering Bucky a smile and willing him to see that this is something Steve would never stand against Bucky on. “You looked good.”

“I’m still a soldier,” Bucky says, not really relaxing. Steve just nods, decides in a split second that he has to say something about it and says, “well, not with that hair. Philips’d have had you sheared by now.”

The laugh that slips out, startled, is not the reaction Steve had expected from Bucky. The shrug is more like it. Bucky reaches up and pulls the hair tie out, letting his hair fall around his face again, though Steve notices that Bucky tucks the tie into the pocket of his sweatpants as if to keep it for the future. He turns his back on Steve and collects his stuff up; a water bottle, a towel, his shoes. He holds them all in one hand and under that arm, keeping a hand free in what Steve thinks must be an attempt at always being combat ready. 

It’s that he’s thinking about and not Bucky’s hair, really, when he asks, “Is there a reason why you’re keeping it long? Not saying it doesn’t suit you, pal. Just wondering. You like it better that way?”

Bucky pauses all his movements the way he does sometimes when people do something new and he’s trying to find a memory to match what they’ve done to, picking it apart so he knows if it’s something he should know already or if he’s allowed to be confused. Steve waits it out, keeping his stance relaxed consciously when he hasn’t felt the need to for two months, almost.

“No,” Bucky finally admits. “It gets in the way.” He stops at that for a moment, but Steve doesn’t jump in because Bucky has pulled a face like he’s struggling with a memory, or with wanting to say something. Steve shifts on his feet and waits. Finally Bucky says, “You remember when you got the ‘flu in ’39 and half way through your recovery I lost my job?” Steve nods, but Bucky’s not waiting for it. “And then the cut down on food or heat, or maybe the worry, I don’t know, but in the midst of that you got knocked for six by something else? You were sick for, what, two months? Three? Your breathing was so shallow some nights I thought you-“ He trails off, lost in memory for a second. “Anyway. First thing you did when you decided to stop being sick — before you’d actually stopped being sick, because you’re a fuckin’ moron — was to make me coffee. The last of the coffee. And the second thing you did was cut my hair.”

“I remember,” Steve says, quietly, because he doesn’t want to disturb this, Bucky’s time with his memories. He deserves time with them, after all that time without them.

Bucky shrugs, visibly pulling himself up and into the present. “Long hair reminds me of you being sick. I hate it.” He pauses again, and then when he speaks it’s like his words are bursting out him. “And then you were. Sick. This week. That witch nearly killed you, and my hair’s long, and I needed to punch something. Nat agreed to help out with that.”

Steve takes three slow steps towards him, and brings a hand up to touch Bucky’s shoulder. He’s been careful with this; he’s tried to give Bucky his space, and it’s been hard not to slip into being in his space all the time, but he’d wanted to give Bucky room to grow into, not suffocate him. He’s been watching what’s probably too much Oprah.

Bucky blinks up at him like a startled rabbit for a second. Steve says, “I’m sorry I worried you,” and it’s something he used to say a lot. It was a stand in for a lot of things he couldn’t ever say, like, “you’d have it so much easier if you left me here.” Bucky laughs, laughs like it’s wrenched out of him, and drops his forehead to Steve’s chest, tucked into a parenthesis against Steve’s body with that one small movement. Steve shifts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder to his neck, pushing his hair out of the way so he can just offer him that, a touch, a tiny comfort.

Bucky doesn’t stay there long, and when he pulls away he’s flushed and looks about ready to run, so Steve catches his shoulder again in a clasp and keeps his voice light as he says, “hey, Buck, d’you want me to cut your hair?” He lets Bucky take the half a step back he needs. “I didn’t want to offer before because I thought it was something you were choosing to keep, y’know? Like how I kept my old fashioned hair. But I’ve had lots of practice with your hair, all those years we couldn’t afford the barber. I’ll do it; you just gotta ask.”

Bucky had run off, then, in that way he had that wasn’t running but defied anyone to follow him, potential violence oozing off him in every movement. Used to be charm, a long time ago. Bucky says, “I don’t know,” before he leaves, and Steve just nods and says, “of course. Think about it.”

They stay in Stark Tower overnight, Bucky sleeping down the hall from Steve in one of the spare rooms on the whole floor Stark has designated as Steve’s. It’s still kind of dark out when Steve wakes up, so early it’s not even quite time for his run. For a moment he’s not sure why he’s woken up, but then Bucky shifts in that darkness, sits down on the bed beside Steve’s legs, and says, “I did think I wanted to keep something, but it turns out the hair was the wrong choice. Everything has double memories for me these days.” He slants a toothy smile Steve’s way, barely visible even as Steve’s eyes adjust to the dark. “It’s exhausting.” He shrugs. His hands are braced on his knees as if he’s ready to push up off the bed and away in a second. “And I sort of thought you didn’t want to touch me.” He ignores the noise Steve makes, and Steve makes himself stay still, concerned by the way Bucky is poised to flee. “I thought- part of me thought that speech you gave, that whole ‘the blood you spilt isn’t on your hands’ thing, was too good to be true. Even for you. I- kept getting more of me back, but you still didn’t touch me, and I thought maybe you didn’t want to because you’d realised I wasn’t ever gonna be your old Bucky again, and I didn’t want to push.”

“ _Buck_.” Steve sits up, pulling his legs up to cross them under himself, reaching to hold onto Bucky somehow. He grabs a hold of Bucky’s shoulder and presses his thumb to his collarbone, wants it to mean _I’m here_ to Bucky as much as it means that to him. “I only didn’t touch you because I didn’t want to push _you_.”

Bucky just nods, like he’d considered that before and rejected it. Now, his face blank, he stares at nothing for a moment as if he’s slotting that information into a file somewhere in his brain. Then he looks at Steve, and asks, “cut my hair?”

The wall on the east side of Steve’s floor of Stark Tower is all uninterrupted glass, a scenic view across Manhattan as the focal point of the living area. Right next to the glass Steve sets up a chair with a towel stretched across the floor underneath. He puts a table next to him, puts on it scissors, a shallow bowl of cold water, and a comb. When Bucky sees it he smiles, says, “Well, the view’s changed,” and sits down.

Steve stands behind Bucky and combs his hair straight back, first, then settles another towel around Bucky’s bare shoulders, taking Bucky’s hand and gripping the ends of the towel together with Bucky’s fingers, saying, “hold it there,” just like he used to. Steve threads his fingers through the hair at Bucky’s temples, stretches it out to see how long it is, then threads his fingers through it again. He leaves his fingertips against Bucky’s skin as he asks, “are you sure?” The sun’s definitely coming up now, coming up quick and bright, and New York is thrown into shades of gold and black.

Bucky nods. Steve waits a moment more, and as if he needs to fill the silence Bucky says, “by rights you never should have survived, all the times you got sick. You were always sick. Always a strong wind away from dying. And then there’s me, falling off a fucking train. How come we’re here?” Bucky had said something like that many years ago in a bar in France. “How’d we get here?” He’d been bitter, then, and angry, and scared. Now he’s still a little of all of those things, but mostly- mostly his voice is like the kid he’d been when Steve had asked “where’re we going?,” the one who’d answered, “the future.” He’s not morose but hopeful when he says, “what right do we have to have ended up here?”

Steve let’s go of Bucky’s hair, drops his hands down to his shoulders and wraps them around him, squeezing quick and loosening his hold in case it panics Bucky but still hugging him tight, resting his cheek against the top of Bucky’s head. He’s laughing when he says, “I don’t know.” It stays a one way hug, but after a moment Bucky touches Steve’s wrist with his fingertips, leaving them to rest there while Steve holds on.

Steve lets go eventually and cuts Bucky’s hair, moving him with gentle hands and going slowly, not used to so much hair. He’s been at it for a while, has cut it down haphazardly to a much more recognisable length and is cutting the hair at the base of Bucky’s neck when he says, “oh.”

“What?” Bucky asks, tensing suddenly but only sounding apprehensive, not actively on alert.

“Nothing, don’t worry, just remembered how to do this,” Steve says, and Bucky lets out a shocked laugh before making an affronted noise and saying, “oh, yeah, cut all my hair off _before_ you tell me you’ve forgotten how. Real nice, Rogers. Fuck you.” Steve laughs, gently tilts Bucky’s head back down, and gets on with it, but it’s dispelled something that had been heavy between them, and by the time Steve gets to Bucky’s fringe, Bucky’s head tilted back, Bucky’s so comfortable he’s closed his eyes, an unconscious half-smile on his lips as he lets Steve work.

The sun is fully up, long up, when Steve finally steps back. His breath catches, because there’s his Bucky. And then he blinks again, and there’s his new Bucky, in the Star Wars pyjama pants Clint had bought Steve for Christmas last year, metal arm braced on his knee. Bucky pushes both of his hands through his hair, eyes closed, smiling as he does so. Steve has no idea what that kind of a difference must feel like but he catches Bucky suppressing a shiver as he runs his fingers through the short hairs at the nape of his neck.

Bucky opens his eyes and smiles at Steve. “Do I dare look?” He asks. “Can’t believe you didn’t warn me you were out of practice before you started. Punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve says, a gut reaction. He’s not sure what makes him do it, then, but Steve drops to his knees in front of Bucky, takes his hands in his and holds them up. Bucky almost jerks them away, stops himself and frowns, a crease between his eyebrows appearing. Steve says, “I said I’d do the believing for you. I want you to know I meant that. These hands are clean.”

Bucky can’t look at him but keeps trying to, glancing at and then away from him, and his hands jerk in Steve’s grips a couple more times while he holds them as if he’s only just suppressing the need to pull away. Bucky gives Steve a look that says how hard this is, for him, and then a second later one that’s just pure exasperation. Steve can almost hear Bucky thinking, “good speech, Captain America; they give out medals for those?” But Bucky finally says, “I know that. Thanks. For-“ He takes a breath, and his next look at Steve catches. It’s half-amusement, half-fond. It’s the look Steve’s waited, oh, seventy years for, give or take a few either side. “Thanks for everything. Even the godawful haircut.”

Steve pushes himself up, squeezes Bucky’s hands just the once as he pulls him out of his seat, says, “hey, being awake in the sixties a couple of times was no excuse for that hair. Your mother would’ve killed you.”

Bucky leans into Steve’s space for a second, watching the view or feeling a memory again, Steve’s not sure. He waits him out. Bucky grins at Steve suddenly, brushing a hand up his back in just a moment of contact, so casual, before striding off to the bathroom to check out his new look.

He calls over his shoulder, “C’mon, Rogers, there’s no killing us.”

**Author's Note:**

> (((((((((((((((((((((((this might have a sequel. well. this might be a prequel. idk idk okay. don't look at me.))))))))))))))))))))
> 
> also, yo, [this is me on tumblr](http://misprinting.tumblr.com/).


End file.
